Can I set up email groups/aliases for multiple recipients in some clever way?

[fatsug]

I am fairly confident that there is a clever workaround for this though I am not 100% sure how.

I have alerts stored in apps on a deployer which makes use of the email function when triggered. I if I need to add/remove recipients from the email alert I have to manually edit several different recipient lists for several different alerts.

What I wan't is a clever way to set up som sort of "list" of recipients which I can name "developers" for instance, and instead of having 20 email adresses as recipients in the alert I could do something like "$devops$". Then just edit recipients at a single location for all alerts instead of each one separately.

I hope this is a clear enough explanation for what I am hoping is possible and welcome all suggestions.

[fatsug]

Wild idea, maybe I can do this with a macro definition?

I'll play around with it and see if it works 

[PickleRick]

No. Macros are expanded in search time, not during processing the results. So macro as the email action recipients won't work.

You can use result-based tokens.

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/9.1.2/Alert/EmailNotificationTokens

EDIT: OK, so you can use macro or a lookup to generate a recipient field in the search results. And then use this result as a token for the given alert setting.

[fatsug]

It was easy enough to test the theory by just using an eval to set the recipients list

index="_internal" earliest="-1s@s" latest="@s" 
| eval recipients="employee1@mail.se,employee2@mail.se"

Then using the results.recipients token for the alert, no problem. However, trying to get the field assigned using a macro, well not so easy.

So I figured I'd try the lookup approach, this works but as I'm not strictly doing a "lookup" i had some problems getting this to work. The best I came up with was this:

| inputlookup email-recipients.csv
| eval recipients = email-adresses
| append [search index="_internal" earliest="-1s@s" latest="@s" | head 1]

"email-adresses" is a comma separated list of email adresses in the lookup (just like above, one long line). Though here I have to lead with "inputlookup" which makes the "search" part a bit less aesthetically pleasing and the append produces some really nasty looking output.

I have "a" solution, though as I am often "doing it wrong" I thought I'd ask if there were any suggestions on how to improve in this solution.

[PickleRick · Accepted solution]

If you had

| eval recipients="employee1@mail.se,employee2@mail.se"

working, why couldn't you just make a macro containing the whole

eval recipients="employee1@mail.se,employee2@mail.se"

?

This way you'd just do

<yoursearch>
| `your_addresses_macro`

 And be done with this?

[fatsug]

The 'polite' way to put it would likely be "limited experienced with macros", the straight one would be "stupidity" 🙂

I'll invest a little more time into this thing before I settle on a solution, thanks for the honest feedback!

[PickleRick]

Don't worry. Everyone starts somewhere 🙂

Glad I could help.

[fatsug]

Yeah, straight up using macros did not work 😅 not with sendemail or alert.action, so 100% correct.

I had not noticed the result tokens and this will be a h*ck of a workaround. Though if I understand the suggestion correctly I could maintain a macros.conf to have a "central" "distribution list", either by app or globally, using definitions (the format looks OK at least) to generate a field in the alert searches containing the macro list. Then use that results token as $result.recipients$ to actually populate the recipients with the list of email adresses from the macros definition.

I'll give this the old college try and push it to the testing environment tomorrow. Thank you and fingers crossed.

[PickleRick]

While there are probably solutions within the splunk itself I suppose the easiest solution to manage would be to create distribution lists in your company email system and simply manage recipients of the reports by membership in this list.

[fatsug]

Yes, 100% agreed and I have tried to do this though for some reason the "splunk" sender was not allowed access to distribution lists and using group inboxes would not achieve the desired outcome.

[PickleRick]

That sounds like a problem with your email system which should be handled with your mail admins 🙂

[fatsug]

I think it was acually a problem with the "security" angle, though I can't remember. So I'll keep my fingers crossed for some creative suggestions 😉